Missing White Female Alert

HBCU.EDU

HBCU is talking about the two security guards that are still being detained, the person that admitted to killing the girl was one of three other guys detained, Authorities identified them as brothers Satish Kalpoe, 18, and Depak Kalpoe, 21, and their friend, 17-year-old Joran Van Der Sloot, the son of a judge . Not the two security guards.

Oh, uhh, ruskie...like I said before...they had "nothing to do with it". They are just black adn that is the problem.

The national media flocked to Salt Lake City to tell the nation about Elizabeth Smart. Why haven't the reporters descended on Milwaukee to tell the nation about Alexis Patterson?

Two cases, two cities, two different stories.

In Milwaukee, a 7-year-old girl disappears on May 3 after setting off for Hi-Mount Community School on W. Garfield Ave. in the central city. In Salt Lake City, a 14-year-old is apparently kidnapped at gunpoint from her family's million-dollar home on June 5.

Patterson is featured in short snippets on the TV show "America's Most Wanted," CNN and Fox News. Otherwise the story receives scant national attention. No stories in The New York Times or Washington Post.

The Times and Post both send reporters to Salt Lake City to write about Elizabeth Smart. There are stories about her in The Boston Globe, Miami Herald and newspapers as far away as Sydney, Australia. MSNBC provides hourly updates, and the case is featured on CNN's "Larry King Live" and the CNBC/MSNBC show, "Hardball with Chris Matthews."

A Nexis search of major newspapers and magazines shows 67 stories about Patterson, almost all of them by The Associated Press and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In the last week, there have been more than 400 stories about Smart.

Tale of black and white?There is another difference between the two cases that cannot be ignored. Smart is white; Patterson black.

"I just feel it's unfair," said John Robins-Wells, a retired investigator who now is assisting leaders of the group Locate Alexis Patterson.

But the reason for the disparity in media attention isn't what some might think, he said Friday. "I don't think it's a racial thing. I'm a white person myself. We have a lot of volunteers who are Caucasians." He thinks different journalists simply have different ideas about what makes a compelling national story.

Many factors determine why journalists focus on one missing child and not another, said Bob Steele, director of the ethics program at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla. For example, Smart apparently was abducted from her own home, tapping into a fear every parent would understand. Coverage of the two cases also may have been influenced by the actions of police departments, parents and national organizations for missing children.

While there are many possible reasons why Smart has become a national story and Patterson has not, race should not be discounted, Steele said Friday. He recalled two cases of missing Hispanic children that were widely covered in the media, but could not come up with a high-profile case involving a missing black child. (Last year's abduction of Jasmine Anderson, a black Milwaukee infant, and the disappearance of black sisters Tionda and Diamond Bradley from Chicago both made national news).

"I think it is essential that we turn the spotlight on ourselves," he said. "Are we prone to the vagaries of racial bias compounded by class bias?"

That question provoked discomfort from some national media outlets on Friday. Others simply dismissed the possibility that race has in any way influenced coverage.

"Was she taken from her bedroom at gunpoint?" snapped MSNBC spokeswoman Phoebe Glasner when asked if an editor could speak about the lack of coverage of the Patterson case.

Although Glasner said she had just come from a meeting where a similar issue was being discussed, she wasn't certain anyone would comment.

At Newsweek, which has a story on the Smart case in this week's issue, Managing Editor Jon Meacham did not return a telephone call seeking comment Friday. Magazine spokesman Ken Weine said any comment would come through him, but added that he would "not be tremendously helpful."

At The New York Times, spokeswoman Kathy J. Park said in an e-mail, "According to our editors, we are looking into the Milwaukee story. You're right that The Times has not taken note of the Patterson case, though I can certainly state that racial inequities play no role in our news judgments."

Stories on Alexis have appeared in the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, and Milwaukee police say ABC's "Good Morning America" made an early inquiry but never followed up.

But "Good Morning America" has a different version of its work on the Milwaukee story, saying a producer earlier this week made repeated calls to the Police Department and tried to track down the family to no avail.

"We actively pursued this story, trying to contact the (police) public information office, special investigations office and the parents," said Lisa Finkel, a spokeswoman for the show. "And when we were not able to get hold of them, we thought our viewers would be well served by a report on an innovative program that assists in the safe return of missing children."

Police have influenceHow police departments work with the media, especially how much information they make public, sometimes influences the coverage a missing child case receives, Steele said.

How media-savvy the parents of a missing child are also plays a role in news coverage. Emotional pleas from mothers and fathers are more likely to lead newscasts or land on front pages. Like the Smarts, Patterson's mother made a tearful plea to abductors to return her child, but the message didn't travel far from Wisconsin.

How parents and neighborhoods are perceived can be another important factor, Steele said. When stories paint a family as "perfect," the tragedy seems somehow more dramatic, he said.

By the same token, media coverage may be less enthusiastic if the parents aren't perceived as completely sympathetic. Some news accounts have noted that Patterson's stepfather served a two-year prison term for selling drugs and also was the getaway driver in an Oct. 28, 1994, bank robbery that resulted in the shooting death of Glendale police Officer Ronald Hedbany.

Steele pointed out that most newsrooms across the country still have a smaller percentage of minorities than the communities they cover. "It's inescapable that we examine whether we are tilted in our coverage and look at how and why we cover certain missing children," he said

So the discrepency is over money right Ruskie and dbgirl? That's scary. So basically you are saying that when there is a choice between social equality (here in the form of media attention giving to the plight of missing blacks-something that could potentially save a life) and money, white people will overwhelmingly choose money.

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sarmstrong806

So the discrepency is over money right Ruskie and dbgirl? That's scary. So basically you are saying that when there is a choice between social equality (here in the form of media attention giving to the plight of missing blacks-something that could potentially save a life) and money, white people will overwhelmingly choose money.

Its not the media's fault that people are more interested in hearing about missing white people than black people.

The media is overly zealous when it comes to race related crimes and issues. If it was a racist kidnapping/murder they would be all over it.

(White) women we loveNation finds time to become obsessed with a damsel in distressBy Eugene RobinsonThe Washington PostUpdated: 2:49 p.m. ET June 10, 2005

Someday historians will look back at America in the decade bracketing the turn of the 21st century and identify the era's major themes: Religious fundamentalism. Terrorism. War in Iraq. Economic dislocation. Bioengineering. Information technology. Nuclear proliferation. Globalization. The rise of superpower China.

And, of course, Damsels in Distress. Every few weeks, this stressed-out nation with more problems to worry about than hours in the day finds time to become obsessed with the saga — it's always a "saga," never just a story — of a damsel in distress. Natalee Holloway, the student who disappeared while on a class trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba, is the latest in what seems an endless series.

Rotating damselsHolloway assumed the mantle from her predecessor, the Runaway Bride, who turned out not to have been in distress at all — not physical distress, at least, though it's obvious that the prospect of her impending 600-guest wedding caused Jennifer Wilbanks an understandable measure of mental trauma.

Before the Runaway Bride, there were too many damsels to provide a full list, but surely you remember the damsel elite: Laci Peterson. Elizabeth Smart. Lori Hacking. Chandra Levy. JonBenet Ramsey. We even found, or created, a damsel amid the chaos of war in Iraq: Jessica Lynch.

The specifics of the story line vary from damsel to damsel. In some cases, the saga begins with the discovery of a corpse. In other cases, the damsel simply vanishes into thin air. Often, there is a suspect from the beginning — an intruder, a husband, a father, a congressman, a stranger glimpsed lurking nearby.

Sometimes the tale ends well, or well enough, as in the cases of Smart and Lynch. Let's hope it ends well for Holloway. But more often, it ends badly. Once in a great while, a case like Runaway Bride comes along to provide comic relief.

But of course the damsels have much in common besides being female. You probably have some idea of where I'm headed here.

A damsel must be white. This requirement is nonnegotiable. It helps if her frame is of dimensions that breathless cable television reporters can credibly describe as "petite," and it also helps if she's the kind of woman who wouldn't really mind being called "petite," a woman with a good deal of princess in her personality. She must be attractive — also nonnegotiable. Her economic status should be middle class or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime (see: Lynch).

24-7 coveragePut all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage. The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment. Since the Holloway story broke we've had more news reports from Aruba this past week, I'd wager, than in the preceding 10 years.

I have no idea whether the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida hung on every twist and turn of the Chandra Levy case; somehow, I doubt he did. But I suspect the apostle of "deconstructionism" would have analyzed the damsel-in-distress phenomenon by explaining that our society is imposing its own subconsciously chosen narrative on all these cases.

It's the meta-narrative of something seen as precious and delicate being snatched away, defiled, destroyed by evil forces that lurk in the shadows, just outside the bedroom window. It's whiteness under siege. It's innocence and optimism crushed by cruel reality. It's a flower smashed by a rock.

Or maybe (since Derrida believed in multiple readings of a single text) the damsel thing is just a guaranteed cure for a slow news day. The cable news channels, after all, have lots of airtime to fill.

This is not to mock any one of these cases (except Runaway Bride) or to diminish the genuine tragedy experienced by family and friends. I can imagine the helplessness I'd feel if a child of mine disappeared from a remote beach in the Caribbean. But I can also be fairly confident that neither of my sons would provoke so many headlines.

Whatever our ultimate reason for singling out these few unfortunate victims, among the thousands of Americans who are murdered or who vanish each year, the pattern of choosing only young, white, middle-class women for the full damsel treatment says a lot about a nation that likes to believe it has consigned race and class to irrelevance.

So the discrepency is over money right Ruskie and dbgirl? That's scary. So basically you are saying that when there is a choice between social equality (here in the form of media attention giving to the plight of missing blacks-something that could potentially save a life) and money, white people will overwhelmingly choose money.

Its not the media's fault that people are more interested in hearing about missing white people than black people.

The media is overly zealous when it comes to race related crimes and issues. If it was a racist kidnapping/murder they would be all over it.

Well some people think it's the media's fault (that they focus on monetary gain).

So the discrepency is over money right Ruskie and dbgirl? That's scary. So basically you are saying that when there is a choice between social equality (here in the form of media attention giving to the plight of missing blacks-something that could potentially save a life) and money, white people will overwhelmingly choose money.

Its not the media's fault that people are more interested in hearing about missing white people than black people.

The media is overly zealous when it comes to race related crimes and issues. If it was a racist kidnapping/murder they would be all over it.

Well some people think it's the media's fault (that they focus on monetary gain).

That is the nature of a for-profit business. So you are saying they should contradict popular opinion and lose money to go with stories that smooth out social inequalities?

So the discrepency is over money right Ruskie and dbgirl? That's scary. So basically you are saying that when there is a choice between social equality (here in the form of media attention giving to the plight of missing blacks-something that could potentially save a life) and money, white people will overwhelmingly choose money.

Ha, what does this have to do with white people? Isn't it that people in a greed based culture choose money over equity, healthcare, justice, etc., again, again, and again.

So the discrepency is over money right Ruskie and dbgirl? That's scary. So basically you are saying that when there is a choice between social equality (here in the form of media attention giving to the plight of missing blacks-something that could potentially save a life) and money, white people will overwhelmingly choose money.

Ha, what does this have to do with white people? Isn't it that people in a greed based culture choose money over equity, healthcare, justice, etc., again, again, and again.

You know what Crow, you're right. Hmmm, good point. Good point too Sarmstrong, that is the nature of for profit business. I'm starting to see this in another light. I mean, there is power in the almighty dollar. I can no longer deny the effects of straight up economics in the equation.

Some people would have us believe though that it is ALL about money. While others might think that it is all about race (this was where I was at), but I now think that the answer lies somewhere in the middle.